The streamer was rusty.  It had served for many such occasions, and suns and rains had damaged it.  People said that Martin Barnes, the undertaker, ought to buy some new crape.  Martin was a very old man himself, but he had no imagination for his own funeral.  It seemed to him grotesque and impossible that an undertaker should ever be in need of his own ministrations.  His solemn wagon stood before the door of the great colonial house, and he and his son-in-law and his daughter, who were his assistants, were engaged at their solemn tasks within.

The daughter, Flora Barnes, was arraying the dead woman in her last robe of state, while her father and brother-in-law waited in the south room across the wide hall.  When her task was performed she entered the south room with a gentle pride evident in her thin, florid face.

“She makes a beautiful corpse,” she said, in a hissing whisper.

Henry Whitman and his wife were in the room, with Martin Barnes and Simeon Capen, his son-in-law.  Barnes and Capen rose at once with pleased interest, Henry and Sylvia more slowly; yet they also had expressions of pleasure, albeit restrained.  Both strove to draw their faces down, yet that expression of pleasure reigned triumphant, overcoming the play of the facial muscles.  They glanced at each other, and each saw an angry shame in the other’s eyes because of this joy.

But when they followed Martin Barnes and his assistants into the parlor, where Abrahama White was laid in state, all the shameful joy passed from their faces.  The old woman in her last bed was majestic.  The dead face was grand, compelling to other than earthly considerations.  Henry and Sylvia forgot the dead woman’s little store which she had left behind her.  Sylvia leaned over her and wept; Henry’s face worked.  Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he, although much younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful Abrahama White.  He remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead and majestic, with something like the light of her lost beauty in her still face.  It was like a rose which has fallen in such a windless atmosphere that its petals retain the places which they have held around its heart.

Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish it.  When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with him.  He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander.  He took his wife’s little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly.  Her bony fingers clung gratefully to his.

When they were all out in the south room Flora Barnes spoke again.  “I have never seen a more beautiful corpse,” said she, in exactly the same voice which she had used before.  She began taking off her large, white apron.  Something peculiar in her motion arrested Sylvia’s attention.  She made a wiry spring at her.

“Let me see that apron,” said she, in a voice which corresponded with her action.